WinXP help

I have an old laptop that I would like to give to my son. The issue I'm having is that when it boots, it goes to the windows xp spash screen, the reboots itself. I probablly have spyware, virus or somthing preventing it from booting all the way. If I boot in safemode the same thing happens. Is there a way I can boot it up off of a rescue disk created from another xp machiene? also all I see about rescue disks are floppys I do not have a floppy drive and any of my computers any more can I create on on a CD?.

Check the manufacturers website for a downloadable boot/install cd if available... or

Do you have an xp install cd? or the factory install cd? (if they even shipped with one, a problem sometimes. ) To be honest, I'd try to find someone with a corporate licensed cd and do the install from that. First I'd download all the drivers and formatting utilities from the laptop manufacturer and follow the instructions for reformatting and partitioning the drive. then, either install with your copy or use a corporate copy ( if you can get your hands on one ) to do the windows install. Just do not let windows have any internet access until you have a firewall up and running!

This is probably your best course of action if you want to retain the programs and data files. But, it's possible that if it's badly infected the baddies will just re-initialize and start back up.

If you only need to keep the data files (not programs) I'd be inclined to recommend a parallel installation to start. Boot off the XP disk, tell it to install into a non-default directory (not WINDOWS ... say WINXP) and let it go. Benefit to trying this is you retain access to any data files once the OS installs, but the install itself is "clean".

If you don't need anything on the laptop, the best solution would be to reformat and then reinstall XP from the git-go.

I have an old laptop that I would like to give to my son. The issue I'm having is that when it boots, it goes to the windows xp spash screen, the reboots itself. I probablly have spyware, virus or somthing preventing it from booting all the way. If I boot in safemode the same thing happens. Is there a way I can boot it up off of a rescue disk created from another xp machiene? also all I see about rescue disks are floppys I do not have a floppy drive and any of my computers any more can I create on on a CD?.

Thanks
Dan

Click to expand...

Dan, I think you probably needs to reinstall Windows. If there is nothing important on the HDD that you need to save its probably a good idea to delete the partition and do a low level format. Some virus cannot be eliminated even by a quick format!

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